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The Social Brain

For most people the ability to interact and communicate with each other seems almost second nature—but
for those with a condition on the autism spectrum social skills can be
difficult to grasp and challenging. We hear from the pioneering autism
researcher from the UK Uta Frith and neuroscientist Chris Frith about
what autism and Asperger's Syndrome can teach us about our Social
Brain.

Transcript

Thomas Kuzma: Hi, my name is Thomas Kuzma. I am 22 and I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I also like long walks on the beach.

Lynne Malcolm: And I’m Lynne Malcolm with All in the Mind. Today, the intricacies of the social brain and what autism can teach us about how we interact and communicate with each other.
Benison O’Reilly remembers only too well when her son was diagnosed with autism.

Benison O’Reilly:
When he was about two I took him to swimming lessons and I think that’s
when I realised that not only did he not speak very much, but he really
didn’t understand what the instructor was saying. He’d started saying a
few words but when I took him back at three, the paediatrician changed
his diagnosis to autism. Still that day is sort of seared in my memory. I
sort of walked out of that room, and it, it’s just like a car crash,
the thing that’s hit you, and I was quite depressed there for a couple
of months and cried a lot and didn’t do an awful lot, I have to say.

He
always had some connection with you. He was not aloof, in the sense
that he was quite a cuddly boy. And he did look you in the eye. It’s
more about the appropriateness of the eye contact; it’s about sharing
experiences with you rather than just looking at you. So a typical
childhood, they’d show you a toy and make sure you were looking at them
and things like that.

And he didn’t really play with other
children. He’d play near them but not with them. And imaginative play
obviously is a huge social thing when you’re flying planes, or when
you’re imagining you’re a plane, or pushing a train around, you know, he
would line the trains up rather than actually push them round a track.
So
he still doesn’t have a friend in a typical sense; like, he has people
he calls his friends and he hangs around with them at school a little
bit, but they don’t come round to our place to play and all that sort of
thing.

Lynne Malcolm: Benison O’Reilly is co-author with Kathryn Wicks of The Australian Autism Handbook.
Autism is a condition which affects neural development and its symptoms
and severity vary widely. It has a strong genetic basis, but more
precise detail about its causes has remained a mystery since pioneering
researcher Uta Frith became interested in it in the early 1960s.

Uta Frith:
In those days, people knew that there were different types of mental
disability, learning disability, but amongst those were also those
autistic people. And people began to see them, when first they seemed to
be quite invisible.

Lynne Malcolm: Uta Frith is
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London
and visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Her
groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of autism led her to
be given the title of Dame in the British honours system last year.
While working at the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital in
London, she first recognised that autism is a condition of the brain
rather than the result of so-called cold parenting.

Utah Frith:
And that seemed to me such an interesting subject to go into and I was
very fortunate that some really pioneering psychologists, Beate Hermelin
and Neil O'Connor, were at the Institute of Psychiatry at that time and
were the first people, I think, in the world to apply proper
experimental psychology methods to say something about the nature of the
difficulties that these children had.

Lynne Malcolm: Thomas Kuzma, now in his twenties, first became aware he had Asperger’s Syndrome when he was in Year 10 at high school.

Thomas Kuzma: I was in the middle of being heavily bullied in my dark years, you could say.

Lynne Malcolm: You call them your ‘dark years’, why do you call them your dark years?

Thomas Kuzma: Because those were the years where I felt most alone.

Lynne Malcolm: How were the kids teasing you, what were they saying to you?

Thomas Kuzma:
I’ve always been the smiley happy guy, jolly and all, and the cool
kids, they saw that and they realised that I was at the time gullible,
because I always felt whenever someone was talking to me they were not, I
could say, serious. They played on the fact that I thought whatever I
thought they were saying was the, you know, the bees knees or whatever.
Because I didn’t understand things like sarcasm, they managed to wield
that in a way where they got me to do some somewhat humiliating things.
The
problem was I didn’t even understand why they were making fun of me.
You know, I just wanted friends, that’s all, and I was being turned into
a scapegoat and into a plaything you could say.

Lynne Malcolm:
Autism was first described more than 60 years ago by Dr Leo Kanner and
at the same time Dr Hans Asperger described what was viewed as a milder
form, known as Asperger's Syndrome.
In the new Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, DSM V, which is about to be published in May,
Asperger’s Syndrome won’t have a separate category but will be
considered as part of the Spectrum of Autism Disorders. This is a
controversial change, which we’ll discuss further next week. But in the
1960s when Uta Frith first became interested in Asperger’s, the thinking
was very different.

Uta Firth: What actually
drove the interest in my case in Asperger’s Syndrome was the recognition
that perhaps the very narrow clinical picture that was described by
Kanner in the first place, the kind of children that we started out
studying, yes, they were there, but there were other children too at the
margins that seemed to be just not quite conforming to this initial
very, very narrow kind of category. So we saw children who actually were
socially very, very inept, in this way that they couldn’t understand
mental states and so on, but their language was good, their intelligence
was very high, and in many ways people thought there might not be so
much wrong with them. And with other people of course that’s not the
case; they also suffer and they also need to learn a lot about how to
negotiate this complicated social life.

Now, it’s really pushing
apart the boundaries that drove my interest in Asperger’s Syndrome. And
it was really a time where people realised that we couldn’t just forget
about all these other cases, these other children and particularly
adults who hadn’t even been diagnosed when they were children but who
had these real problems in social interaction, which you just have to
say they are just very typically autistic.

And that was how I
think the concept got much more popularised. Many people really loved
the idea that they could have a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome,
because it seemed sort of more interesting, more hopeful, more
respectful to use that label than to use the label ‘autism’. Autism had
this kind of very bleak picture associated with it and Asperger’s
Syndrome I think gave a somewhat different idea about what perhaps a
grown-up person could be like who actually has very many skills even
though they can’t function very well in a neurotypical society.

Lynne Malcolm:
The condition of autism various enormously. Some people are very
withdrawn; they don’t speak at all and have debilitating repetitive
behaviour and hypersensitivity. Others can be highly articulate and
gifted. So it’s very difficult to categorise, but Uta Frith and her
husband Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University
College London, are collaborating to try and capture the nature of the
autistic mind, particularly the social aspects.

Uta Frith:
What we have concentrated on is this core problem of social
interaction, reciprocal communication; that seems to be at the heart of
the nature of autism. Even in these very extreme cases, we can see there
is something in common in the way that they don’t quite integrate into
the social world as we all do. This reciprocal interaction, that seems
to be missing. It’s not whether they are uninterested and withdrawn, or
in some sense aloof —no, that’s not the problem, because we find many
who are not aloof—the problem is not understanding about social
behaviour.

Now, we understand there’s an incredibly intuitive way.
For us it’s completely obvious that we explain how somebody behaves in
terms of their motivations; you know, their psychological attitudes,
their beliefs. Now, that’s completely different from how we interpret
the non-social world; you know, we can understand cause and effect in
physical terms and we can interpret it in a completely different way.
You know, the rock falls down and if something is in the way it will hit
it—that’s a kind of cause and effect explanation.

Now, the
interesting thing is this: the case of autism has shown us that these
two worlds are really different. So there is always this understanding,
really right from the beginning, that actually autistic children and
adults could understand physical cause and effect perfectly well, but
they couldn’t really cope with this social cause and effect stuff, which
is different. It’s an innate kind of ability that we have this
propensity to think of the social world in different terms, process it
in a way that makes sense to us. So we would say, well, somebody has
just seen an event, so obviously he knows about that event. If he hasn’t
seen the event, then we might actually give him some false information;
we can do all these things, we can lie, because we are constantly
thinking of what’s going on in their mind. We’re not just taking into
account what is actually the physical state of affairs.

Lynne Malcolm:
So, just to explain a little bit further about the nature of the social
difficulties that children with autism have, I know you’ve done a
number of experiments on this. For example, they may have difficulty
with pretence, with lying; they don’t understand irony.

Uta Frith:
Well, one of the first clues that really stuck out when autistic
children were studied was that unlike other really quite learning
disabled children and very young ordinary children, they didn’t seem to
understand make-believe play, pretend play. And then later on many
parents said they can’t lie, they are so very honest, which of course is
one of their really endearing qualities. And they don’t understand why
people should lie.

So one of the experiments that I think really
shows how different may be the understanding in the autistic mind is of a
social situation where deception plays a role is an experiment I did
long ago where we contrasted a situation we called ‘sabotage’ and a
situation we called ‘deception’.

Now, sabotage is where you
prevent somebody else from, say, getting into a box physically, because
you lock the box. Absolutely cause and effect—the autistic children were
totally able to do this. The contrast condition in this experiment we
called ‘deception’. So there was no key, there was no lock to do this.
They said ‘Wow, this is very difficult.’ You still don’t want the thief
to get at that box, you can lie to the thief; you can say the box is
locked, because of the thief can’t actually see that.

Now, very
young children and also learning disabled children who are not autistic
seem to immediately latch on to this and say to the thief the box is
locked when it isn’t. Now, we found that autistic children had real,
real problems with this and they really didn’t do that, although they
were perfectly able to prevent the thief when they had a lock and key.
So the sabotage was fine but the deception was not.

Lynne Malcolm:
And you use a theory to explain the way individuals with autism
interact socially and that’s what’s known as ‘the theory of mind’. Can
you explain the theory of mind?

Uta Frith: Well,
the theory of mind is a nickname and it’s very misleading, actually,
because you immediately think that must be sort of some highfaluting
thing that you know is like a philosophy, like having a theory of mind.
Actually what it means is that we have this ability to automatically and
spontaneously attribute mental states to other people and predict what
they will do as a result of that.

So we actually coined the word
‘mentalising’ for this. So we say we ‘mentalise’ when we automatically
think that somebody is, for example, behaving according to their
particular knowledge or their particular intentions. And that is the
basis of the theory, that we think this kind of mechanism that is
somehow an innate predisposition in the mind, in the brain, is not
functioning well in autism.

Lynne Malcolm: But
then how do you explain the other superior abilities that many people
with autism have? They can have extreme focus, they can be very
creative, and show characteristics of real genius.

Uta Frith:
Absolutely. This is the real amazing thing about autism, that we do
have these sharp contrasts and they really show us that yes, we can
separate social processes in the mind and non-social processes in the
mind. Otherwise we wouldn’t have got this idea. We would have thought
there are sort of all-purpose general thinking processes and you apply
them to the social world, you apply them to the physical world, but it
doesn’t seem to be the case. Autism teaches us that you can be very good
in one and not at all good in the other. Actually I think Chris just
wanted to say something that would probably just modify what I said
myself.

Chris Frith: No, I think one possible
explanation for the striking abilities of some autistic people is
precisely that they are not stuck like the rest of us so much in the
social world, so they can break out of the sorts of conformities that we
have. And they are not so much influenced by what everybody else is
doing and they can really do something different. And this is one aspect
of creativity, of course.

Lynne Malcolm: Chris and Uta Frith, both from University College London.

You’re with All in the Mind on RN, Radio Australia and online, I’m Lynne Malcolm.
Today
we’re exploring autism and what it can tell us about our social brain.
Chris Frith specialises in researching the biological basis of the brain
using imaging technologies. So what actually happens in the brain of an
autistic person?

Chris Frith: Oh, that’s a very
difficult question. It was because of the demonstration by Uta and
others that autistic people seemed to have this particular circumscribed
problem in social understanding and not in other kinds of understanding
that we were beginning to think that maybe social understanding depends
on special networks in the brain. And indeed over the last 20 years or
so this has been confirmed. There is a relatively small number of brain
regions that seem to be particularly active whenever we’re engaged in
mentalising or social interactions, and we are beginning to understand
to some extent what some of these regions are more precisely doing.

When
we look at the autistic brain, I think what we tend to see is that
these same areas are simply less active. It’s as if they are not able
to, or choose not to use these kinds of computations, as I would call
them, for dealing with the social world. But we’re very much at the
beginning, so it would be very difficult for me to say, ‘This is what
the autistic brain looks like,’ and it certainly can’t be used, for
example, for diagnosis.

Lynne Malcolm: So caution has to be taken in terms of interpreting what you can see in brain scans into the actual experience of somebody.

Chris Frith:
Right, that is correct. I mean, another theory which again you can use
brain imaging to look at to some extent is the idea that for most of us,
social interactions are very rewarding, simply being with people is
rewarding and looking at smiling faces is rewarding. I mean, that’s
fairly well established now there are particular bits of the brain that
are interested in reward, whatever form it takes—whether it’s money, or
food, or people saying you’re a good chap. So you can then explore
whether there’s something going wrong with this system in
autistic people. Are they simply not interested in the social world and
that’s why they don’t learn about it? And at the moment I would say the
jury is out, but this is the sort of thing you can explore with these
techniques.

Lynne Malcolm: With Uta Frith’s
pioneering work in autism research and Chris Frith’s expertise in the
neural basis of the brain, they’re trying to get a better understanding
of how we communicate and share representations of the world.

Uta Frith:
Yes, we are embedded in the social world; for example, most of our
learning is through other people. It’s not that we just go along and try
things out and make our own mistakes; we actually observe what other
people do, we copy them all the time. So there might be very special
circuits in the brain that can also be part of the social brain that,
you know, are sort of particularly watchful about what other people are
doing—where they are looking, for example—and makes us copy them.

So
that’s a very, very interesting aspect of our social nature and it’s
also an aspect that makes us on the whole pro-social. We like to be
where other people are, we like to do what other people do, we have
quite a lot of pressure to conform.

Lynne Malcolm: So what are some other examples of the way we use interaction to communicate and to learn?

Chris Frith:
Well, for example, when children are growing up they have to learn all
sorts of things very rapidly. And, for example, they have to learn the
words of their native language; I mean, a huge amount is being learned.
But what is interesting is that this depends very much on an
interaction. So, for example, they don’t simply observe adults talking
about things; it’s mostly done because the adult actually points to a
thing and names it.

And the child knows perfectly well when it’s
being told that this is the name of an object and when this is purely an
accident. So, for example, if the mother drops the saucepan on the
floor and says ‘bother’ the child doesn’t learn to call saucepans
‘bother’, because they are very well aware of the nature of this
interaction because it’s not directed at them. And, interestingly, there
are at least anecdotes about autistic children not showing this effect
so that they might forever afterwards call saucepans ‘bother’.
So
that would be an example of the kind of interaction which is critical
for our learning about the world. There is also something called ‘social
referencing’, where when where a child is confronted with a new object
they will typically look round at their mother and if she smiles they
will approach it, and if she frowns they will not approach it. So again
this is an example of an interaction being intimately concerned with how
we learn about the world.

Lynne Malcolm: And
there are some interactions and mechanisms that come naturally and
spontaneously but there are other intentional mechanisms, aren’t there,
that we learn?

Uta Frith: Well, for example, you
could say that we have this tendency to form in-groups and out-groups
and if you become aware of this, you can actually counteract it. So
these are things that we learn until we can really manage all these
tendencies given to us by millions of years of evolution which have to
do with, you know, just survival in possibly small tribal groups that
had to really fight to have enough resources, that kind of thing. Of
course, things have changed now and we can actually think much more
about these things and therefore also change them.

I think one
interesting example also in our social interaction is empathy. And
people often think that, ‘Oh, this must surely be part of mentalising,’
but we actually think it can be quite a separate brain mechanism and
cognitive mechanism. So to feel empathy is really something where you
turn off your self and you are completely feeling what another person
feels. It’s like having some contagion. So if somebody cries, you know,
you feel like crying. You may not actually go and break out in tears—you
might if you are a young child—but you know you can inhibit that, but
you are so influenced by this. That’s sort of like a really basic form of empathy.

And
we think, for example, that in most autistic people we know, this is
perfectly there; there are many examples of this kind of empathy. But
then there are other forms of empathy which really have to do with
mentalising and they have to do with saying ‘Oh, I must show a cheerful
face when I actually know my friend is desperately sad, but if I’m sad
too it will be worse for him.’ So these are forms of social interaction
also governed by our brain but sort of in some sense by modifying other
things that are there. So a lot of what the brain does is actually
stopping and starting and enhancing and suppressing, perhaps, other
kinds of mechanisms that just go into action automatically whether we
like it or not.

Chris Frith: One of the big
impetuses for developing ideas about the social brain was the discovery
of the so-called mirror neurons, which again were found about 20-odd
years ago. And these are neurons originally shown in the monkey, where
the same neuron is active when the monkey makes an action like picking
up a peanut and also when the monkey sees the experimenter picking up a
peanut. So in that sense they are mirroring what you do and what you see
other people doing seems to activate the same region of the brain.
And
this in a sense is interesting because it shows that the brain has
solved the problem of how you make the connection between what you do
and what you see other people doing, which is quite an interesting
computational problem. And this seems to be the basis of the sort of
empathy or contagion that Uta was talking about. So you see similar
responses, at least in people, that when I am in pain the particular bit
of my brain lights up and when I see my friend in pain the same bit of
the brain lights up.

So you get all this mirroring. This is
happening all the time when we interact with people, although we’re
probably mostly unaware of it. So in that sense there we’re very
embedded in the social world, we are constantly being influenced by the
emotions and behaviour of the person we are interacting with. And this
is probably extremely helpful for the interaction to take place and to
understand each other, because we will understand each other better the
more similar we become.

Lynne Malcolm: So to
what extent does Uta Frith believe that people with autistic conditions
can learn to change the way they interact socially?

Uta Frith: They
can learn enormously well. They are absolutely wonderful in the way
they can also learn about mental states and what they mean. They can use
them, but I believe they use them in a different way. So they can
overcome many of the basic problems that perhaps they had when they were
children. But it is, I think, in the end an effortful process for them.
It is something that you should, you know, always say if an autistic
person surprises you by their amazing insight, also by their use of
mental states, that this may have come at a great cost to them.

So
compensation is not cheap. It can be done, but you really also need all
the resources you can possibly get. And they are not just from inside
the person—you know, like this amazing intelligence that many of them
have—but also from the outside: lots of support, lots of teaching, all
of these things are incredibly important, but they can make a big
difference.(Music)
Autism I think gives us a
unique insight into the human condition, into the mind. It’s always, I
think, through some kind of unexpected behaviour that we suddenly become
aware of the things that we otherwise completely take for granted, that
seem completely automatic to us, we think nothing of. So autism has
really made us much more aware of the complicated processes and
computations that are necessary to function as social beings.

Chris Frith:
I think that’s a very interesting point, because indeed we never really
thought about mentalising and social interactions. I mean, before
people started talking about autism in the social brain, it was striking
that studies of people with brain lesions looked at all sorts of
abilities but virtually never looked at their ability to interact
socially.

And it’s only, in a sense, since the discovery of
autism that people have started to ask, well, in dementia are there
particular problems in social interactions. On the other side of this,
of course, as Uta was hinting at, is that we hadn’t really thought about
how social interactions work. And people like me who are interested in
computers and robots and so on are now wondering about can you actually
write computer algorithms that would enable computers or robots to
interact with people and to make inferences about their mental states.
And people are beginning to try and do this, but this is very early
days and of course slightly worrying.

Lynne Malcolm: Emeritus Professors Chris and Uta Frith from University College London.

For more details on what you’ve heard today go to the All in the Mind
website, where you’ll also find transcripts and audio of all the
programs. While you’re there, leave a comment on the site or visit us on
Facebook.

And do join me next week when you can hear more about the experience and treatment of people with an autism spectrum condition.

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.